Here at GetReligion we write a lot about how the news media wrestle — successfully and otherwise, but mostly otherwise — with religion stories that have public policy consequences. That makes sense since these stories constitute the bulk of what religion reporters produce. They dominate because they’re far and away the easiest for journalists to make sense of.

Reporters spend far less time tackling religion’s deeper, less linear realms. Including, how we make sense of our lives. 

For traditional believers, religion is key to extracting sufficient meaning from life to keep its bewildering complexity and insecurity from rendering us dysfunctional. For religion journalists, historically that’s meant concentrating on the minutia of faith group wrangling over the day’s public issues. 

Comprehend the jargon, restate it in more universally understood language, organize it in dramatic fashion, and — voila — you’ve mastered the formula of successful religion journalism.

But as with so much about contemporary journalism, that was then and this is now — the hallmark of which is radical change.

A dominant trend in today’s America, and the West in general, is the move away from traditional religious expression. I’m referring, of course, to the growing cohort of the religiously disengaged “nones,” who by some estimates now account for a fourth of all Americans and 35 percent of those under age 30. Click here for the Pew Forum research on that.

A hefty percentage of these people have tired of public policy religion stories, so many of which seem to defy resolution year after year, decade after decade. Religiously disengaged, they have no interest in hearing about the ongoing squabbles of groups they feel have nothing to offer them.

Now combine that with the growing trend in journalism away from what we like to call the historical American model of fact-based, balanced, “objective” reporting. And remember that it’s replacement is opinion and expository writing.

All this leads me to conclude that an important path ahead for religion journalism is focusing on the internal human dynamic that powers our need for meaning, commonly expressed via religion and its secular equal, philosophy. 

In short, I’m referring to the realm of deep psychology.

(To be clear: By speaking in psychological terms I am not challenging the veracity of any particular religious narrative. My goal here is only to explain, in small part, how we function as humans and why this is important for engaging “nones”.)

An August blog post published by Scientific American is a case in point. 

The post is by no means mainstream legacy journalism. Nor was it written by someone I’d label a journalist, though the borders of the trade have blurred considerably. Rather, it’s by a Columbia University psychology professor, Scott Barry Kaufman, a prolific writer who specializes in explaining the mind’s innermost secrets to the lay public.

In this post, Kaufman explored what it takes for us to feel that our lives have meaning.

In trying to answer this question, most researchers focus on the valence of the life experience: is it positive or negative? [The italics, here and in a quote below, are Kaufman’s.]

Researchers who focus on positive emotions have amassed evidence suggesting that we are more likely to find more meaning in our lives on days when we experience positive emotions. In contrast, researchers taking a meaning-making perspective tend to focus on meaning in the context of adjustment to stressful events. These two areas of research are often treated separately from each other, making it difficult to answer the question about which valence of our emotional life—positive or negative—is most likely to be meaningful.

Kaufman goes on to say, citing various researchers, that for many if not most of us it’s the combination of the positive and the negative, the seeming highs and lows of life — the interplay of the agony and the ecstasy, if you will — that together infuse us with the sense of meaning we crave to experience some semblance of psychological equanimity.

Or, as Kaufman put it, it’s the “extremity of the experience, not the valence” that provides meaning. 

This explains why military veterans say they never felt so alive as they did in combat, as frightening and horrible as it was. This dynamic also covers profound religious states that alternate between ecstatic peaks and utter discombobulation.

A serious health crisis can also do it. This happened to me earlier this year when a series of major cardiac operations brought me closer to death than I care to admit, and from which I’m still recovering.

So the key to meaning is intensity. Feeling so deeply that we transcend, if only for a moment, our limited personalities and feel propelled into real empathy and a sense of transpersonal connection, no matter how discomforting. 

The world’s varied religious traditions offer a smorgasbord of paths to achieve this sense of meaning. Secular philosophies have their own narratives. Just how varied all this is can be may be sampled by clicking here.

No wonder traditional journalism has such trouble explaining it all. But as I’ve sought to make clear, it’s a changed profession in a changed world.

Unfortunately, this need to shift focus comes at a time when journalism is also suffering a brain drain.

Staff religion-reporting jobs have become as endangered as polar bears. Journalism platforms — meaning the numerically dominant web and broadcast outlets — are trending away from in-depth, serious reporting in favor of eyeball-grabbing and overhyped quick hits.

So I’m not encouraged that the radical shift in religion journalism I’ve proposed here will successfully emerge any time soon, if ever. But that, in my view, doesn’t make it any less important.

Just another collateral victim of the era we live in.